Life with Picasso

by Françoise Gilot

  Paris was finally liberated a few days later, on the twenty-fourth of August. Soon after that, Pablo returned to the Rue des Grands-Augustins with two small gouaches he had painted while he was there from a reproduction of a bacchanalian scene by Poussin, The Triumph of Pan.

  One of the first effects of the Liberation was the arrival of Hemingway at the Rue des Grands-Augustins. Pablo was still with Maya and her mother when he arrived. The concierge in Pablo’s building was a very timid woman but not at all bashful. She had no idea who Hemingway was but she had been used to having many of Pablo’s friends and admirers leave gifts for him when they called in his absence. From time to time South American friends of his had sent him such things as hams so that he could eat a little better than the average during the war. In fact Pablo had more than once shared his food parcels with her. When she told Hemingway that Pablo was not there and Hemingway said he’d like to leave a message for him, she asked him—so she told us later—“Wouldn’t you perhaps like to leave a gift for Monsieur?” Hemingway said he hadn’t thought about it before but perhaps it was a good idea. He went out to his jeep and brought back a case of hand grenades. He set it down inside her loge and marked it “To Picasso from Hemingway.” As soon as the concierge deciphered the other markings on the case, she ran out of the loge and refused to go back until someone took the case away.

  Once Paris was liberated, all the cultural key points, such as the Office of the Director of the Museums of France, were cleaned out. Collaborators and Pétainists were fired at once. As a result, since Picasso was the painter who was Number One on the German Index, the first revenge to take on the Germans was to mount a big Picasso retrospective as a token of the change in policy. The exhibition was arranged by Jean Cassou, chief curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne, and it formed part of the Salon d’Automne. It created an immediate scandal, and drew fire chiefly from two groups: artistic reactionaries and political agitators. The first group was made up of the many people who had never seen a large and representative collection of Picasso’s paintings, especially those of the war period, with their tortured forms, or even those of the period 1932–1936, which are not completely naturalistic. They revolted immediately against the massive exhibition of this violent art that overnight had become official, in a sense.

  The other group was composed of right-wing students and ex-Pétainists. They came en masse shouting their protests and trying to pull the paintings off the walls. Theirs was really a political protest disguised as aesthetic disapproval.

  During the Occupation, many French Communists had been active and heroic workers in the Resistance. One of the most important of these was Laurent Casanova. His wife, Danielle Casanova, had been killed by the Germans. He had made three escapes from prison camp but had been recaptured each time. On a fourth attempt he reached the outskirts of Paris. Friends of his got in touch with Pablo’s friend, the poet Paul Eluard, also a Party member, and told him Casanova must be hidden somewhere, preferably with people who would not know whom they were sheltering. Paul asked the writer Michel Leiris if he would be willing to hide a Communist in his apartment for a month or so, not telling him who Casanova was. At that time to give asylum to an escaped prisoner, a Communist or a Jew, was risking the death sentence.

  Michel Leiris agreed and Casanova went to live just around the corner from Pablo’s studio, in the apartment at 53 bis, Quai des Grands-Augustins, which, before the Occupation, Pablo’s dealer D.-H. Kahnweiler and his wife had bought to share with the Leirises.

  Kahnweiler had been Pablo’s dealer, off and on, for many years. As a German, Kahnweiler had been obliged to flee from France during World War I and his pictures had been confiscated and sold by the French government. He had gone back into the picture business after that war but had now been forced to flee again, and he and his wife, at the time, were hidden in the Free Zone. Since 1940 his gallery had been called the Galerie Louise Leiris. Louise, “Zette,” Leiris, was the wife of Michel Leiris and was Kahnweiler’s sister-in-law. She was not merely a front for him; she was an active co-worker in the business, and had been with Kahnweiler since 1921. Now that Kahnweiler was again in hiding—this time as a Jew fleeing from the Germans—the business could go on, reasonably intact, because his gallery was officially hers.

  During the month Casanova stayed in the apartment he had much influence on all that group. For the first time Pablo had the occasion to talk with a Communist Party figure who was at the same time sufficiently intelligent and open-minded to be acceptable to someone whom the Party dogmatists would not have impressed. As a result of those contacts with Casanova, a number of intellectuals entered the Communist Party, Pablo among them.

  Although Pablo’s art was anathema to most of the Party hierarchy, they realized how useful his name and image would be to their cause. I knew Casanova had impressed him greatly. I knew also that two of his closest friends, the poets Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, had played a part in his conversion. But when I asked him what, exactly, had made him join the Party—since all the “statements” I had read in the press sounded like propaganda hand-outs—he said, “I came into the Party as one goes to the fountain.” The right-wing groups, then, who marched on the exhibition so vociferously were trying to discredit Pablo in the hope of blocking his potential usefulness to the Communist Party.

  I was often on duty at the exhibition, along with other young painters and art students who admired Picasso’s work without any particular political affiliation. Our job was to protect the paintings and hang again those that the demonstrators occasionally succeeded in pulling down. Two months earlier, armed militia had been shooting at people in the streets. Now that the Liberation had come, the agitation was simply carried over into other forms. People came to the exhibition to vent their political venom.

  Many of the paintings, called simply Femme Couchée, were very rhythmical portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter. Some of these had been shown before by the dealer Paul Rosenberg. There were other portraits, much more tormented and of a slightly later period, of Dora Maar, and still lifes with a candle and the head of a bull, or a cat catching a bird, all rather hallucinatory and somber. After the nightmare of the Occupation it must have been a shock for the general public to be exposed to work that was so close in spirit to the years they had just lived through. Seeing the image of a period in which all norms had been swept aside was perhaps in some ways more difficult than living through it.

  All of a sudden Picasso was the Man of the Hour. For weeks after the Liberation you couldn’t walk ten feet inside his atelier without falling over the recumbent body of some young GI. They all had to see Picasso but they were so tired they would just make it to the studio and then fall asleep. I remember once counting twenty of them sleeping in various parts of the studio. In the beginning they were mostly young writers, artists, and intellectuals. After a while they were simply tourists and at the head of their list, apparently, along with the Eiffel Tower, was Picasso’s studio.

  From that moment on, Picasso stopped being a private citizen and became public property. I remember one day bicycling across the Place Clichy and stopping at an intersection where there was a newspaper kiosk. I looked up and saw Picasso’s face staring down at me from the cover of some picture magazine, like Life or Match, with his favorite pigeon perched on his head or shoulder. It gave me quite a shock. I had always realized that he was, of course, in part a public personage, but I had felt that that aspect was a façade, and that beneath it there was the private person, intact and inaccessible to the public gaze. But when I saw the photograph with that bird, which was quite untamed and would never allow anyone but Pablo to touch it and would come to him only when he was alone and fly away again when anyone else approached, it seemed to me a kind of invitation to the whole world to come close enough to touch.

  ONE OF THE EARLY VISITORS from America after the war was a picture dealer whom I shall call Jacques. In the past, he had bought many of Picasso’s finest paintings. Before the war he h
ad left Paris to settle in New York. Now that the war was over, he had returned to Europe on a Liberty ship to search for treasures. But by the time he reached the Rue des Grands-Augustins he had already lost some of his enthusiasm. He told Pablo he had brought very little baggage but had made room for a three-pound can of bismuth—he suffered from a stomach ulcer—and a very considerable number of American cigarettes, which he was sure were not available in Europe. The customs officers at Le Havre had lost no time impounding this suspicious-looking cargo. Jacques had tried to explain that the can contained bismuth for his ulcer. The customs officers had another idea: that it might be, at least in part, cocaine, and they sent it off for chemical analysis. The cigarettes—well, they might just possibly contain marijuana, some of them. Meanwhile Jacques was told to stay on call at a hotel in Le Havre. After two days, the analyses proved negative and Jacques was allowed to proceed to Paris, after payment of a substantial sum for laboratory charges and, of course, a confiscatory import duty on the cigarettes. Since armies of GI’s were unloading various PX supplies on the black market, Paris was flooded with American cigarettes, which he could have bought for considerably less than what his own now stood him.

  As it happened, Pablo’s joining the Communist Party had resulted in a temporary cooling off in the affections of certain American buyers and a drop in the sales and prices of his paintings in America. Jacques said he thought that was a shame. But, he told Pablo, he didn’t intend to let that fact interfere with either his friendship for Pablo or his interest in Pablo’s work. “In spite of everything, I’m here to buy,” he said, “if your prices are reasonable enough. You know I’m not one to want to profit from another man’s hard luck. When Renoir died, I learned about it at ten o’clock in the morning. At 10:30 a man came into my gallery and asked if I had any Renoirs. I couldn’t imagine how he’d had the news so soon but I showed him two or three small paintings. He wanted something more important, he said. Then I was sure he knew. I brought out a much bigger painting and I could see that was it. He asked me the price. I can’t stand the idea of people trafficking on the death of a painter, so I made him a price for Renoir dead, not Renoir alive.”

  Pablo was not deeply moved. “I’m sure you don’t speculate on the death of artists,” he said, “but it won’t do you any good to try to speculate on me alive. My prices are higher that way. I suggest you go back to America and try to pick up some Picassos at prewar prices there. Here there’s a certain value attached to being still alive in spite of the war. That makes my paintings more expensive.”

  “You have no heart,” Jacques protested. “You’re not my friend. Everything I say you use against me. And to think I wanted to do you a good turn!”

  But since Pablo wasn’t interested in this good turn, they did no business that day.

  A few years after that, Jacques returned to see Pablo. By then the Picasso market was thriving as never before, and Jacques was very eager to do business. I think he had a sincere affection and admiration for Pablo but he wanted paintings, too. He arrived almost breathless at the Rue des Grands-Augustins. He was a very thin man and must have weighed not much more than a hundred pounds. But that day he looked almost fat. He was literally stuffed with dollars. He said to Pablo, “At last I’m going to have some paintings again. And I’ve got money. Look.” He pulled out rolls of bills and began to pile them up on the table. Every once in a while he would snap a sheaf of them under Pablo’s nose. Pablo wasn’t at all impressed, but looked at him sadly and said, “It’s too bad, my poor friend. You’re not really rich enough for me now. I don’t think you can buy any more paintings from me.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Jacques. “You sell to Kahnweiler. Even to Carré. Why not to me? Look here.” He found another pocket that was untapped and brought out several more rolls of bills. Finally, he pulled out his checkbook and laid it on the table. Pablo shook his head. Then he noticed Jacques’ hat. “That’s a nice hat,” he said. “I like it.”

  “You should,” Jacques said. ‘It’s from Lock, in London.” He took it off, showed Pablo the label and his initials in gold-leaf on the band. Pablo tried it on. It was so small it perched on the top of his head like a peanut on an elephant’s back. He took it off and returned it. “But I’ll get you one in your size,” Jacques offered.

  “Well, all right,” Pablo said. “If you want to go to London and buy me a hat—just like that one—then perhaps, in spite of everything, I might sell you a painting, because I’m a nice guy and I like you.” Jacques left immediately, hopped on the next plane for London and was back at the atelier the following day with a duplicate of his Lock hat, with Pablo’s initials in gold on the hatband. “Fine,” said Pablo. He tried it on, looked at himself in the mirror, then said, “You know, this doesn’t look at all good on me, this hat. You keep it.” He took it off and set it onto Jacques’ head. It was much too large. He pulled it down over Jacques’ ears and walked away. There were no paintings for Jacques that day.

  WHEN PABLO WAS YOUNG, the dealers took advantage of him whenever they could; they would buy his paintings at their price. Later, things were reversed: Everyone wanted his paintings and it was he who made the price. From then on, it was simply a question of deciding whether a dealer would or would not have any paintings and if so, which ones, since Pablo always kept the best for himself. He went to great pains not to let the dealer know until the very last minute whether or not he would get any pictures, and if he did, whether they would be important paintings or just relatively minor ones.

  I soon had occasion to see that with his dealers, just as with everyone else, Pablo had a manner all his own of utilizing the aphorism, “divide and conquer.” In 1944 and 1945 Kahnweiler was not his only dealer. He sold also to Louis Carré. He would sometimes arrange to have the two of them call at the Rue des Grands-Augustins on the same morning. Under the circumstances Carré and Kahnweiler were not very fond of each other and Pablo would see to it that they were kept waiting for nearly an hour in the anteroom. They were obliged to talk to each other: they couldn’t sit there and say nothing. Then, after a long wait, Pablo would let one of them come into the Holy of Holies. As a rule, since he liked Kahnweiler better, he would let Louis Carré come in first. Carré knew very well that Kahnweiler, like the lover one dangles on a string, was waiting anxiously to see the expression on his face when he came out, thinking: If Carré is smiling, it’s because he’s got paintings; if he looks sad, it’s because he didn’t get any. And Carré was intelligent enough to lend himself to this little game. So, especially if he had no paintings, he would pat Pablo on the back, calling him “Mon cher ami,” and give every evidence of being very pleased with himself. Sometimes I would see Kahnweiler’s face go ashen when Carré came out like that. He could do nothing about it. It was stronger than he was. It was not simply a question of jealousy between picture dealers: I think Kahnweiler felt, really, such an exceptionally strong personal involvement with Picasso and his work, in addition to the normal business instincts of a picture dealer, that when his rival Carré would come out, looking delighted, slapping Pablo on the back, that meant not only that he probably had paintings, but also that someone else had enjoyed the confidence of this man who was so terribly important to Kahnweiler. And that must have seemed far worse. Very often it meant no such thing, but Kahnweiler nevertheless assumed it did and his suffering softened him up considerably. Pablo would then have him come in, but he was so depleted by the spectacle of Carré leaving so jauntily that Pablo could manipulate him very easily. If Pablo wanted, for example, to raise his prices with Kahnweiler, he was sure to let Louis Carré in first. At that time, Carré had a very youthful appearance, with a great deal of zest, a well-built stocky figure, and a facility with words and gestures—the man of action. Kahnweiler, of course, was an introvert, with the manner of a man raised in Frankfort in rather puritan fashion.

  That was one of my first insights into Pablo’s standard technique of using people like ninepins, of hitting one p
erson with the ball in order to make another fall down.

  THAT WINTER, Pablo had given me The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to read. I had found it very entertaining and told him I’d like to meet Gertrude Stein. One spring morning he said to me, “We’re going to see Gertrude this week. That will amuse you. Besides, I have a lot of confidence in her judgment. If she approves of you, that will reinforce whatever good opinion I might have of you.” From that moment on, I lost all desire to meet Gertrude Stein. But I had to go; he had made an appointment with her.

  When the day arrived, I had lunch with Pablo at Le Catalan. He was unusually cheerful, but I couldn’t swallow a thing. Toward 3:30 we climbed the broad, cold, exposed stairway of Gertrude Stein’s house in the Rue Christine and Pablo knocked at the door. After a little wait, the door was opened a crack, almost grudgingly, like the door to the studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. Through the slit I saw a thin, swarthy face with large, heavy-lidded eyes, a long hooked nose, and a dark, furry mustache. When this apparition recognized Pablo, the door was opened wider and I saw a little old lady wearing an enormous hat. It was Alice B. Toklas.

  She let us into the hallway and greeted Pablo in a deep baritone voice. When Pablo introduced me, she ground out a “Bonjour, Mademoiselle,” with an accent that sounded like a music-hall caricature of an American tourist reading from a French phrase book. We took off our coats and hung them in a little vestibule. We passed into a larger gallery lined with paintings, many of them from the Cubist period and mostly by Pablo and Juan Gris. From that room we went into a salon flooded with sunlight. There, in an armchair facing the door, under her portrait painted by Pablo in 1906, sat Gertrude Stein, broad, solid, imposing, her gray hair cropped very close. She had on a long brown skirt to the ankles, a dull beige blouse, and her feet were bare inside heavy leather sandals.